The Waiting Country is on a break this week, so instead the masterful pen of HCG Moule is our companion. Long out of print, Jesus and the Resurrection1 is a wonderful piece of devotional writing that delights in the text of the final chapters of John’s Gospel. Oh, and there’s a poem written with John 21:15ff in mind.
Sympathy for the fallen
Commenting on Peter and John being together on Easter day, Moule writes,
[Mary Magdalene] found Peter and John in company; perhaps in the same house, though [the text] suggests she may have called at two doors. Very beautiful is the sight of this special intimacy of the two Apostles. We seem to see it first when they go (Luke 22:8) to prepare the room for the Last Passover; then, when they stand together at the door of the Palace of the Priest; again in this incident; again in the following chapter, and again and again in the early passages of the Acts. How different was each from each - how helpful each to each manifestly became! And we may specially note how deeply “the disciple Jesus loved” had learnt in that wonderful fellowship to “love his brother also.” John had never actually denied his Lord; Peter, probably in John’s hearing, had repeatedly denied Him. Many a 'saint' of later day would, I fear, have thrust Peter away from all fellowship with himself. But not so John. At once, before the Resurrection, before the hope of it, while there was yet no joy in his own heart, John has joined himself to Peter; has taken him to be his brother as well as the Virgin to be his mother.
If for us, in our day, the sense of our Redeemer's love, our rest upon the bosom of His forgiving friendship, does anything, it will make us condemn and renounce the spiritual self-righteousness which shuts up sympathy. It will make us feel how wonderfully welcome to the Lord is “whosoever cometh,” even if he comes fresh from some grievous fall, some denial of the Blessed name. It will make us so far like Him who loved us, that while we shall see and feel sin, as sin, more and more keenly and painfully (and not least, the sin of not loving the Lord Christ, and submitting the whole being to him), we shall more and yet more truly love, and seek to help, others for whom our aid may avail, however strange the case, however great the fall.2
Shoreline
Two men along the
shore;
one broken; one whole,
having been broken
to pieces,
set in stone,
then breaking into
day.
Two men
talking along the
shore
of being broken,
of being loved
into being
whole.
Whole in love,
whole in peace,
whole in being
held
and led
and situated
along a
shoreline of peace.3
HCG Moule, Jesus and the Resurrection, Seeley & Co, 1898
p.18f
This first appeared on The Waiting Country blog